[April 27, 2006] Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Initiatives hosted an all-day forum on March 28, 2006 entitled “Envisioning a Rhode Island EAD finding aid collaboration”. To open this dialogue, Brown invited 20 participants representing a cross-section of Rhode Island universities, public libraries, historical societies, and state-level agencies/consortiums/networks to discuss the feasibility of forming a Rhode Island consortium to create a union database of guides to archival and manuscript collections throughout the state. The finding aids would be encoded in EAD (Encoded Archival Description), a data structure standard endorsed by the Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress, which allows searching across collections and institutions, and retains the hierarchical nature of each collection.

In the morning, CDI staff at Brown ( Sarah Shaw, Jennifer Betts, and Patrick Yott) demonstrated consortia finding aid sites developed for other states and regions, and gave an overview of EAD. Kelcy Shepherd (Five College Project Archivist) was invited to speak on “Working within an EAD consortium & an update on the Archivists’ Toolkit”. This was followed by demonstrations of three existing Rhode Island finding aid websites at the Rhode Island Historical Society, Naval War College, and University of Rhode Island.

After lunch, the group discussed opportunities for collaboration and how a plan for effective collaboration might be developed. A smaller group was formed to carry the work forward (develop and seek funding for a pilot project to encode a sample of 30 finding aids contributed from six Rhode Island institutions, to be posted on a consortia website entitled “Rhode Island Archival & Manuscript Collections Online”). The RIAMCO Pilot Project Group will be comprised of representatives from Brown University, Redwood Library and Athenaeum, Rhode Island Historical Society, Rhode Island State Archives, University of Rhode Island, and Westerly Public Library. Sarah Shaw (Digital Initiatives Librarian, Brown University) will facilitate meetings of the pilot project group. For further information, contact sarah_shaw@brown.edu